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'A towering masterpiece by a writer of genius.' IndependentIndia, 1975. An unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency. Amidst a backdrop of wild political turmoil, the lives of four unlikely strangers collide forever. An epic panorama of modern India in all its corruption, violence, and heroism, A Fine Balance is Rohinton Mistry's prize-winning masterpiece: a Dickensian modern classic brimming with compassion, humour, and insight - and a hymn to the human spirit in an inhuman state.'A masterpiece of illumination and grace. Like all great fiction, it transforms our understanding of life.' Guardian'Magical.' New York Times'Monumental.' Time'Astonishing.' Wall Street JournalWhat readers are saying:'One of the most layered and beautifully executed books I've ever read ... Easily one of my all time favourite books!''Many say that the mark of a good book is that it stays with you; well, I read this several years ago and I still find myself thinking of the characters ... Beautiful.''What a storyteller, what a wide canvas he covers of India ... Wonderful.''One of the best and most entertaining books I have ever read ... I can't recommend it highly enough.''Often heartbreaking, always evocative ... A book to savour rather than to gallop through.''One of the best books I've read ... Not a book for the faint-hearted, but it is a book with a big heart.'

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The puppet can entertain or terrify, evoke the innocence of childhood, or become a magical entity, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets are often creepy things, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this haunting and beautiful book, Kenneth Gross takes us on a meditative journey through the world of puppet theater, exploring the mysterious fascination of these unsettling objects. Engaging particular aspects of the puppet, from its blunt grotesquerie to its talent for metamorphosis, Gross teases out their meanings, showing us the puppet in the guise of angel, seducer, demon, and destroyer. On a global tour of puppets onstage, he takes us to the raucous Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in the United States and Europe where puppets enact everything from Shakespearean tragedy to surrealist fables of discovery and loss. At the same time, he explores the puppet in poetry and fiction-including Collodi's cruel, wooden Pinocchio; puppetlike characters in Dickens and Kafka; Rilke's innocent puppet-angels; and the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth's Micky Sabbath - as well as in the work of artists such as Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. A lovely, expressive book about re-seeing what we know, or what we think we know, "Puppet" evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in art and life.

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Winner of The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017. Winner of the Shine/Strong Poetry Award 2017. Several Deer is the debut collection of a young Northern Irish poet. As much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, Crothers writes about destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, failure, and rock 'n' roll. But he does so with rhythmic subtlety and verbal craftsmanship, with unmistakable technical acuity. The poems are acrobatic: homophones, mondegreens, malapropisms, paraprosdokians, antanaclasis, polyptoton and puns are juggled with dexterity. Yet, for all their craft, the poems remain empathic, sincere, abscised from the particular experience rather than plucked from the common branch, addressing real people, albeit with the cynic's ironizing compulsion. 'Now send in the clowns', ends the collection's opening poem - and so they follow: happy and sad, wise and tragic, a touch melodramatic, wilfully misunderstood. They console themselves with rhythm, with rhyme, and with riffs on literary and pop culture new and old, high and low. Above all, perhaps, it is the air of excited verbal mischief that endears the ear to Several Deer. Easily sidetracked and keen to be soundtracked, the collection doesn't take its sadness seriously. It listens to the hits.

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In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. It's almost a cliche that music and poetry are cousins, and that the term lyric names this cousinship. Yet the actual forms music takes within poetry are unclear, even contested. At the same time, our assumptions about these forms condition the ways we hear poetry. So it's useful to us as both readers and writers to discover where the analogies between music and poetry are. Fiona Sampson's Music Lessons outlines some of these, using ideas and examples from Martin Heidegger to J.S. Bach, Emily Dickinson to Leonard Cohen, and George Herbert to Julia Kristeva. Her first lecture, Point Counter-point, uses melody to suggest a link between poetic line, phrase and breath. Here is my space explores how pureA", abstract forms can be created in time in the same way that they are created in space. Finally, How strange the change looks at sensuous apprehension and the pleasure principle.

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WINNER OF THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020When a dead body is found in the Thames, caught in the chains of HMS Belfast, it begins a search for a missing woman. A policeman, a documentary film-maker and an Irish nurse named Chrissie all respond to the death of the unknown woman in their own ways. London is a place of random meetings, shifting relationships - and some, like Chrissie, intersect with many. The wonderful Linda Grant weaves a tale around ideas of home; how London can be a place of exile or expulsion, how home can be a physical place or an idea, how all our lives intersect. 'Reminds us of the depth and strength of the communities that are our beloved London. Thank you' Philippe Sands'There's a Dickensian quality to the opening scene and yet it's one of the most bitingly contemporary publications of the year - a shifting, polyphonic narrative' Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday'There is a richness in this novel, found in a migrant experience that is deeply embedded rather than distinct from its environment... a compelling read' Jake Arnott, Guardian'The novel is fleet-footed... the way even the minor characters flare into life gives the novel richness and depth... a novel fit for shifting, uncertain times' Suzi Feay, Financial Times

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His elegantly-crafted tale of sibling rivalry, Honoré de Balzac's The Black Sheep is translated from the French with an introduction by Donald Adamson in Penguin Classics.Philippe and Joseph Bridau are two extremely different brothers. The elder, Philippe, is a superficially heroic soldier and adored by their mother Agathe. He is nonetheless a bitter figure, secretly gambling away her savings after a brief but glorious career as Napoleon's aide-de-camp at the battle of Montereau. His younger brother Joseph, meanwhile, is fundamentally virtuous - but their mother is blinded to his kindness by her disapproval of his life as an artist. Foolish and prejudiced, Agathe lives on unaware that she is being cynically manipulated by her own favourite child - but will she ever discover which of her sons is truly the black sheep of the family? A dazzling depiction of the power of money and the cruelty of life in nineteenth-century France, The Black Sheep compellingly explores is a compelling exploration of the nature of deceit.Donald Adamson's translation captures the radical modernity of Balzac's style, while his introduction places The Black Sheep in its context as one of the great novels of Balzac's renowned Comédie humaine.Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850) failed at being a lawyer, publisher, printer, businessman, critic and politician before, at the age of thirty, turning his hand to writing. His life's work, La Comédie humaine, is a series of ninety novels and short stories which offer a magnificent panorama of nineteenth-century life after the French Revolution. Balzac was an influence on innumerable writers who followed him, including Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.If you enjoyed The Black Sheep, you might like Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, also available in Penguin Classics.

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In this ground-breaking Research Handbook, leading international researchers analyse how negotiators' gender shapes their behaviour and outcomes at the bargaining table, in both work and non-work contexts. World-class experts from the field of negotiation present cutting-edge research on gender and negotiation, highlighting controversies and generating new questions for consideration. The Research Handbook offers helpful insights to negotiators and forges a path for future research. The first section highlights how gender shapes negotiation within close relationships and identifies informal social rules for how women and men are expected to negotiate, exploring the socialization patterns and historical contexts that produced these norms and the implications for women at the bargaining table. Chapters discuss how underlying negotiation processes such as trust, emotion, communication and non-verbal behaviour are shaped by gender, as well as considering a number of pragmatic solutions to the obstacles women face as self-advocates. Offering insights for both practitioners and researchers, this Research Handbook will be invaluable to teachers and, also, female professionals who want to understand how to get better outcomes from negotiation. It will also be required reading for HR professionals who wish to understand how and why organizational policies regarding negotiation can level the playing field. Contributors include: E.T. Amanatullah, J.B. Bear, L. Berg, J.E. Bochantin, H.R. Bowles, T.H. Burns, A. Dickson, A.L. Elias, K.R. Gallagher, B.A. Gazdag, M.P. Haselhuhn, H. Jazaieri, J.A. Kennedy, S. Kesebir, D. Kolb, L.J. Kray, C.T. Kulik, S.Y. Lee, M. Liu, B.A. Livingston, S. Mor, M. Olekalns, J. Overbeck, M. Pillutla, T.L. Pittinsky, J. Qiu, L. Ramic-Mesihovic, I.Y. Ren, S.W. Ryu, A. Sabanovic, Z. Semnani-Azad, W. Shan, R. Sinha, A.F. Stuhlmacher, N.R. Toosi, C. Trombini, J. Wareham, L. Zervos

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The enclosure of the commons, space once available for communal use, was not a singular event but an act of "slow violence" that transformed lands, labor, and basic concepts of public life leading into the nineteenth century. The Afterlife of Enclosure examines three canonical British writers—Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy—as narrators of this history, the long duration and diffuse effects of which required new literary forms to capture the lived experience of enclosure and its aftermath. This study boldly reconceives the realist novel, not as an outdated artifact, but as witness to the material and environmental dispossession of enclosure—and bearer of utopian energies. These writers reinvented a commons committed to the collective nature of the social world. Illuminating the common at the heart of the novel—from common characters to commonplace events—Carolyn Lesjak reveals an experimental figuration of the lost commons, once a defining feature of the British landscape and political imaginary. In the face of privatization, climate change, new enclosures, and the other forms of slow violence unfolding globally today, this book looks back to a literature of historical trauma and locates within it a radical path forward.

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One of the early twentieth century's most prolific potteries, the S.A. Weller Pottery Company, of Zanesville, Ohio, produced art pottery and artwares reflecting the major art movements of the day, including Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco. Here, over 520 striking color images display the broad array of wares produced by Weller from 1895 to 1948, including such well-known lines as Art Nouveau, Aurelian, Coppertone, Dickens Ware, Eocean, Forest, Hudson, Louwelsa, Sicard, and Woodcraft. This sweeping survey includes a sampling of hand decorations by many of the company's respected artists and also illustrates the highly varied, innovative glaze treatments employed over the years on a wide range of decorative items. The carefully researched text includes a history of the firm, a fascinating review of how changing art movements and public demands influenced the pottery, a detailed bibliography, helpful listing of all known Weller line names, and complete index. Values for the wares displayed are found in the captions. An essential reference for Weller enthusiasts and all who are passionate about ceramics!

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In photographs only seen briefly as part of studio press kits distributed upon release of a new film, these long-lost stills of Hollywood’s leading ladies have been reverently rendered into color portraits that not only evoke a treasured past of beauty and glamour, but also seem comfortably familiar to the contemporary eye. These posed photos have been chosen not only for their bespoke sensuality, but also for how the discrete addition of color has elevated a black and white still to a kind of artistic grace, prompting rediscovery of classic Hollywood’s most beautiful women. Actresses portrayed here include Julie Andrews, Anna Mae Wong, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, Carroll Baker, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Angie Dickinson, Eva Marie Saint, and many others.

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From one of our finest poets comes a collection about time—about memory, remembrance, and how the past makes itself manifest in the world. Called “the poet of things” by Richard Howard, Don Bogen understands the ways objects hold history, even if they’ve grown obsolescent, even when they’ve been forgotten. So objects—rendered in cinematic detail—fill these poems. A desk, a mailbox, a house delivering its own autobiography. Hospitals: the patients who have passed through, the buildings that have crumbled. And, in a longer view, the people who survive in what they left behind: Thom Gunn, Charles Dickens, and the pre-Columbian architects who designed the great earthworks of Ohio two thousand years ago. Songs, ephemeral by nature but infinitely repeatable, run throughout the collection. “What did they tell me, all those years?” Bogen writes. Immediate Song offers us a retrospective glance that is at once contemplative and joyous, carefully shaped but flush with sensuous observation: a paean to what is both universal and fleeting.

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London’s best pub tour guide and host of the celebrated Liquid History Tours leads readers off the beaten path and through the doors of some of the least celebrated but most wonderfully authentic pubs England’s capital city has to offerIt’s not hard to locate London’s iconic pubs, where Chaucer wrote, Shakespeare performed, or Dickens penned a novel. What’s more difficult and, argues John Warland, ultimately more rewarding, is finding that special pub that has just the right vibe; the pub that’s tucked away far from the maddening crowds of tourists and noisy out-of-towners; that almost mythical pub that you’ll want to return to on a rainy evening, or show off to your friends. These are the hidden gems that Warland introduces you to in his newest pub guide. Spanning every corner of London from the city center to its outer limits and beyond, these watering holes are permeated by personality and a passion for traditional hospitality

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Why is liberalism so often dismissed by thinkers from both the left and the right? To those calling for wholesale transformation or claiming a monopoly on "realistic" conceptions of humanity, liberalism's assured progressivism can seem hard to swallow. Bleak Liberalism makes the case for a renewed understanding of the liberal tradition, showing that it is much more attuned to the complexity of political life than conventional accounts have acknowledged. Anderson examines canonical works of high realism, political novels from England and the United States, and modernist works to argue that liberalism has engaged sober and even stark views of historical development, political dynamics, and human and social psychology. From Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Hard Times to E. M. Forster's Howards End to Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, this literature demonstrates that liberalism has inventive ways of balancing sociological critique and moral aspiration. A deft blend of intellectual history and literary analysis, Bleak Liberalism reveals a richer understanding of one of the most important political ideologies of the modern era.

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The feline has inspired poetic adoration since the days of the pharaohs, and the poems collected here cover an astonishing range of periods, cultures, and styles. Poets across the continents and centuries have described the feline family-from kittens to old toms, pussycats to panthers-doing what they do best: sleeping, prowling, prancing, purring, sleeping some more, and gazing disdainfully at lesser beings like ourselves. Here are Yeats's Minnaloushe, Christopher Smart's Jeoffry, Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat, T. S. Eliot's Rum Tum Tugger, William Blake's tyger and Rilke's panther. Here are tributes from Sufi mystics, medieval Chinese poets, and haiku masters of imperial Japan, from Chaucer, Shelley, Borges, Neruda, Dickinson, and Shakespeare. Here are the cats of Mother Goose, and the one who wore the hat for Dr. Seuss.The Great Cat will delight cat lovers everywhere, celebrating as it does the beauty, the mystery, the gravity, the grace, and, of course, the unassailable superiority of the cat.

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This book is the second of a series documenting a thousand years of selected London streets and their respective histories. Some of the streets have their roots and foundations in places of worship, locations for trading or because of their geographical location or particular topography. With St Paul's at its western end and St Mary-le-Bow as its centrepiece, Cheapside goes back further than a thousand years, all the way to the Romans and beyond. Its colourful history includes kings, queens, poets, playwrights, murderers, criminals, broadcasters, inventors, politicians, pioneers, philanthropists, religious fanatics, revolutionaries, diarists and architects who all played their part in making Cheapside what Charles Dickens Jnr called the greatest thoroughfare in the City of London. With London's streets harbouring a multitude of long lost stories ripe for the recounting, Mike Read's A Thousand Years of a London Street series is one with endless potential. The only question that remains is which street will pique the interest of this broadcaster turned historical supersleuth next?

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There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. Moving around the modern city becomes more than from getting from A to B, but a way of understanding who and where you are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont, retraces a history of the walker. From Charles Dicken's insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution. Pacing stride for stride alongside such literary amblers and thinkers as Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Matthew Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. He asks can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city - or ourselves - by taking the pavement?

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Do you wish it could be Christmas every day? This smashing Text Guide is the next best thing - it contains everything students need to write brilliant essays about A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and it's suitable for all major GCSE English exam boards!Inside, you'll find clear, thorough notes on the novel's context, plot, characters, themes and the writer's techniques - plus quick warm-up activities, in-depth exercises and realistic exam-style questions at the end of sections, alongside challenging questions for students aiming for Grades 8-9. Not only is this book packed with essay advice and engaging activities, it'll also gives you access to our online Sudden Fail quizzes - ideal for putting your skills to the test! To round it all off, we've rustled up a classic CGP cartoon-strip summary of the text to help remind you of all the important plot points.What's more, there''s a free Online Edition with even more activities for specific exam boards - ideal if you're on the move!F

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The first world title fight in Wales featured Swansea lightweight boxer, Ronnie James, and the city produced another three challengers at the highest level before Enzo Maccarinelli finally reached the pinnacle. Colin Jones, Brian Curvis and Floyd Havard were far from the only top-class exponents of the boxer's craft to emerge from Wales's second city. And the rival conurbation across the Loughor Bridge has contributed its share of stars to the fistic firmament. As well as two-weight British champion Robert Dickie and the legendary Gipsy Daniels, who once knocked out the great Max Schmeling inside a round, Llanelli gave birth to the man who codified the laws by which the sport is regulated, famous under the name of his patron, the Marquess of Queensberry. Some 50 boxers are profiled in these generously illustrated pages. Whether or not you hail from the area, if you are a fight fan, this book will make a worthy addition to your shelves.

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Gripping, emotional Second World War saga for fans of Annie Groves, Shirley Dickson and Soraya Lane.1943, and The Bluebird Girls are at the top of their game. They are touring with ENSA, visiting army bases across the world in order to boost the morale of the brave boys fighting in the desert and the jungle. The hours are long and the travelling uncomfortable, but Bea, Rainey and Ivy wouldn't be anywhere else for the world.Then tragedy strikes the group and their little showbusiness family. Their manager, Blackie, and Rainey's mother Jo find themselves with heavy new responsibilities, and the change in circumstances causes the girls themselves to reconsider their lives.For years, singing on stage has been their only dream, and they have made so many sacrifices to get where they are. But now other possibilities - relationships, babies - are on the horizon. Could this be the end for The Bluebird Girls?

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'An irresistible, feel-good story infused with infectious humour' - Miranda DickinsonThe sun is shining in the quiet little seaside town of SandybridgeSandybridge is the perfect English seaside town: home to gift shops, tea rooms and a fabulous fish and chip shop. And it's home to Grace - although right now, she's not too happy about it. Grace grew up in Sandybridge, helping her parents sort junk from vintage treasures, but she always longed to escape to a bigger world. And she made it, travelling the world for her job, falling in love and starting a family. So why is she back in the tiny seaside town she'd long left behind, hanging out with Charlie, the boy who became her best friend when they were teenagers? It turns out that travelling the world may not have been exactly what Grace needed to do. Perhaps everything she wanted has always been at home - after all, they do say that's where the heart is...

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''I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific'' Sarah Waters''If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man'' Nick HornbyPatrick Hamilton''s novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne''s new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.The Midnight Bell, a pub on the Euston Road, is the pulse of this brilliant and compassionate trilogy. It is here where the barman, Bob, falls in love with Jenny, a West End prostitute who comes in off the streets for a gin and pep. Around his obsessions, and Ella the barmaid''s secret love for him, swirls the sleazy life of London in the 1930s. This is a world where people emerge from cheap lodgings in Pimlico to pour out their passions, hopes and despair in pubs and bars - a world of twenty thousand streets full of cruelty and kind

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'I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific' Sarah Waters'If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man' Nick HornbyPatrick Hamilton's novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne's new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.Impromptu in Moribundia is a satirical fable about one (nameless) man's trespass (through a fantastical machine called the 'Asteradio') into a parallel universe on a far-off planet where the 'miserably dull affairs of England' are mirrored and transformed into an apparent idyll of bourgeois English imagination.Moribundia is the 'physical enactment of the stereotypes and myths of English middle-class culture and consciousness.' Yet the narrator comes to discover that he has stumbled among a people characterised by 'cupidity, ignorance, complacence, meanness, ugliness, short-sightedness, cowardice, credulity, hysteria and, when the occasion called for it . . . cruelty and blood-thirstiness.

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From traditional seaside holiday treats like candy floss, ice cream and fish ’n’ chips, to the British fascination for baking, the Victorian era has shaped British culinary heritage. Victoria’s austere attitude after an age of Regency indulgence generated enormous cultural change. Excess and gluttony were replaced with morally upright values, and Victoria’s large family became the centre of the cultural imagination, with the power to begin new traditions. If Queen Victoria’s family sat down to turkey on Christmas day, so did the rest of the nation. Food was a significant part of the Victorians’ lives, whether they had too much of it or not enough. The destitute were fed gruel in the workhouses – the words of Dickens’s Oliver are forever imprinted on our minds: ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’ The burgeoning street traders spilling over from the previous century devolved into a whole new culture of ‘mudlarks’, trotter boilers and food slop traders, to name but a few. Wealthy Victorians gorged with the newly emerging trend for breakfast, lunch and tea. Public dining became de rigeur, and the outdoor ‘pique-nique’, introduced a new way of eating. Victorians also struggled against many of these trends, with the belief that denial of food was a moral good. This was the era of educating and training in food management, combined with the old world of superstition and tradition, that changed British society forever.

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There are few more precious routines than that of the bedtime story. So why do we discard this invaluable ritual as grown-ups to the detriment of our well-being and good health? In this groundbreaking anthology, Ben Holden, editor of the bestselling Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, challenges how we think about life, a third of which is spent asleep. He deftly explores not only the science of sleep but also why we endlessly tell stories – even to ourselves, as we dream. Holden combines his own illuminating storytelling with a treasure trove of timeless classics and contemporary gems. Poems and short stories, fairy tales and fables, reveries and nocturnes – from William Shakespeare to Haruki Murakami, Charles Dickens to Roald Dahl, Rabindranath Tagore to Nora Ephron, Vladimir Nabokov to Neil Gaiman – are all woven together to replicate the journey of a single night’s sleep. Some of today’s greatest storytellers reveal their choice of the ideal grown-up bedtime story: writers such as Margaret Drabble, Ken Follett, Tessa Hadley, Robert Macfarlane, Patrick Ness, Tony Robinson and Warsan Shire. Fold away your laptop and shut down your mobile phone. Curl up and crash out with the ultimate bedside book, one you’ll return to again and again. Full of laughter and tears, moonlight and magic, Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups joyfully provides the dream way to end the day – and begin the night . . .

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The arrival of the Anthropocene brings the suggestion that we are only now beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, only now confronting fears and anxieties of ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. While pointing out that reflections on disaster were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, Last Things pushes romantic thought toward an altogether new way of conceiving the “end of things,” one that treats lastness as neither privation nor conclusion. Through quieter, non-emphatic modes of thinking the end of human thought, Khalip explores lastness as what marks the limits of our life and world. Reading the fate of romanticism—and romantic studies—within the key of the last, Khalip refuses to elegize or celebrate our ends, instead positing romanticism as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of survival and sustainability. Each chapter explores a range of romantic and contemporary materials: poetry by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth; philosophical texts by William Godwin, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; paintings by Hubert Robert, Caspar David Friedrich, and Paterson Ewen; installations by Tatsuo Miyajima and James Turrell; and photography by John Dugdale, Peter Hujar, and Joanna Kane. Shuttling between temporalities, Last Things undertakes an original reorganization of romantic thought for contemporary culture. It examines an archive on the side of disappearance, perishing, the inhuman, and lastness.

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The profound economic and social changes in the post-Civil War United States created new challenges to a nation founded on Enlightenment and transcendental values, religious certainties, and rural traditions. Newly-freed African Americans, emboldened women, intellectuals and artists, and a polyglot tide of immigrants found themselves in a restless new world of railroads, factories, and skyscrapers where old assumptions were being challenged and new values had yet to be created. In An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World, Zeese Papanikolas tells the lively and entertaining story of a diverse group of figures in the arts and sciences who inhabited this new America. Just as ragtime composers subverted musical expectations by combining European march timing with African syncopation, so this book's protagonists—who range from Emily Dickinson to Thorstein Veblen and from Henry and William James to Charles Mingus—interrogated the modern American world through their own "syncopations" of cultural givens. The old antebellum slave dance, the cakewalk, with its parody of the manners and pretensions of the white folks in the Big House, provides a template of how the tricksters, shamans, poets, philosophers, ragtime pianists, and jazz musicians who inhabit this book used the arts of parody, satire, and disguise to subvert American cultural norms and to create new works of astonishing beauty and intellectual vigor.

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The monarchs of seventeenth-century Europe put a surprisingly high priority on the abolition of dueling, seeing its eradication as an important step from barbarism toward a rational state monopoly on justice. But it was one thing to ban dueling and another to stop it. Duelists continued to kill each other with swords or pistols in significant numbers deep into the nineteenth century. In 1883 Maupassant called dueling “the last of our unreasonable customs.” As a dramatic and forbidden ritual from another age, the duel retained a powerful hold on the public mind and, in particular, the literary imagination.Many of the greatest names in Western literature wrote about or even fought in duels, among them Corneille, Molière, Richardson, Rousseau, Pushkin, Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, Twain, Conrad, Chekhov, and Mann. As John Leigh explains, the duel was a gift as a plot device. But writers also sought to discover in duels something more fundamental about human conflict and how we face our fears of humiliation, pain, and death. The duel was, for some, a social cause, a scourge to be mocked or lamented; yet even its critics could be seduced by its risk and glamour. Some conservatives defended dueling by arguing that the man of noble bearing who cared less about living than living with honor was everything that the contemporary bourgeois was not. The literary history of the duel, as Touché makes clear, illuminates the tensions that attended the birth of the modern world.

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In The Extravagant Robert Baker explores the interplay between poetry and philosophy in the modern period, engaging a broad range of writers: Kant, Wordsworth, and Lyotard in a chapter on the sublime; Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and Bataille in a chapter on visionary quest; and Kierkegaard, Dickinson, Mallarmé, and Derrida in a chapter on apocalyptic negativity. His guiding concern is to illuminate adventures of “extravagant” or “wandering” language that, from the romantic period on, both poets and philosophers have undertaken in opposition to the dominant social and discursive frames of a pervasively instrumentalized world. The larger interpretative narrative shaping the book is that a dialectic of instrumental reason and creative negativity has been at work throughout modern culture. Baker argues that adventures of exploratory wandering emerge in the romantic period as displaced articulations of older religious discourses. Given the dominant trends of the modern world, however, these adventures repeatedly lead to severe collisions and crises, in response to which they are later revised or further displaced. Over time, as instrumental structures come to disfigure every realm of modern life, poetries and philosophies at odds with these structures are forced to criticize and surpass earlier voices in their traditions that seem to have lost a transformative power. Thus, Baker argues, these adventures gradually unfold into various discourses of the negative prominent in contemporary culture: discourses of decentering, dispersing, undoing, and erring. It is this dialectic that Baker traces and interprets in this ambitious study.

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Karol Charles does not have time for ghosts. It’s Christmas Eve and she’s at the office. Sure, her kids thought she’d be making cookies with them back at home, but this is important. This is what it means to “have it all.” Then, a familiar cough from the adjacent room jolts her out of her work. It can’t be possible. Marley is dead. She has been for years.With Marley’s death, Karol is now running their law firm by herself. But she still strives to live by her best friend and law partner’s creed: The job makes the money and the money buys the things that make your family happy. Working all the time is a sacrifice Karol has made willingly.However, Karol’s life takes a drastic turn when she falls outside of Rockefeller Center and has to be hospitalized. But something is wrong with this hospital. There’s a ghost in the waiting room and another magical visitor in the lobby. With them, Karol revisits long-forgotten memories and begins to unravel the truth about her current situation—and a future that is anything but cheery and bright.In this modern twist on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Karol’s journey through her past, present, and future reveals a difficult yet liberating truth: It is far better to have what matters than to have it all.

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The arrival of the Anthropocene brings the suggestion that we are only now beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, only now confronting fears and anxieties of ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. While pointing out that reflections on disaster were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, Last Things pushes romantic thought toward an altogether new way of conceiving the “end of things,” one that treats lastness as neither privation nor conclusion. Through quieter, non-emphatic modes of thinking the end of human thought, Khalip explores lastness as what marks the limits of our life and world. Reading the fate of romanticism—and romantic studies—within the key of the last, Khalip refuses to elegize or celebrate our ends, instead positing romanticism as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of survival and sustainability. Each chapter explores a range of romantic and contemporary materials: poetry by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth; philosophical texts by William Godwin, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; paintings by Hubert Robert, Caspar David Friedrich, and Paterson Ewen; installations by Tatsuo Miyajima and James Turrell; and photography by John Dugdale, Peter Hujar, and Joanna Kane. Shuttling between temporalities, Last Things undertakes an original reorganization of romantic thought for contemporary culture. It examines an archive on the side of disappearance, perishing, the inhuman, and lastness.

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From the UK Poet Laureate and bestselling translator, a spirited book that demystifies and celebrates the art of poetry todayIn A Vertical Art, acclaimed poet Simon Armitage takes a refreshingly common-sense approach to an art form that can easily lend itself to grand statements and hollow gestures. Questioning both the facile and obscure ends of the poetry spectrum, he offers sparkling new insights about poetry and an array of favorite poets.Based on Armitage’s public lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, A Vertical Art illuminates poets as varied as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, A. R. Ammons, and Claudia Rankine. The chapters are often delightfully sassy in their treatment, as in “Like, Elizabeth Bishop,” in which Armitage dissects—and tallies—the poet’s predilection for similes. He discusses Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, poetic lists, poetry and the underworld, and the dilemmas of translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Armitage also pulls back the curtain on the unromantic realities of making a living as a contemporary poet, and ends the book with his own list of “Ninety-Five Theses” on the principles and practice of poetry.An appealingly personal book that explores the volatile and disputed definitions of poetry from the viewpoint of a practicing writer and dedicated reader, A Vertical Art makes an insightful and entertaining case for the power and potential of poetry today.

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Victoria's accession to the throne in 1837 coincided with the birth of a now notorious gender stereotype—the "Angel in the House." Comparing the position of real women—from the Queen of England to middle-class housewives—with their status as household angels, Elizabeth Langland explores a complex image of femininity in Victorian culture. Langland offers provocative readings of nineteenth-century fiction as well as a rare glimpse into etiquette guides, home management manuals, and cookbooks. She traces the implications of a profound contradiction: although the home was popularly depicted as a private moral haven, running the middle-class household—which included at least one servant—was in fact an exercise in class management. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Benjamin, and Bourdieu, and of recent feminist theorists, Langland considers novels by Dickens, Gaskell, Oliphant. and Eliot, as well as the memoirs of Hannah Cullwick, a former domestic servant who married a middle-class man. Langland discovers that the middle-class wife assumed a more complex and important function than has previously been recognized. With her substantial power veiled in myth, the Victorian angel mastered skills that enabled her to support a rigid class system; at the same time, however, her achievements unobtrusively set the stage for a feminist revolution. Nobody's Angels reconstructs a disturbing picture of social change that depended as much on protecting class inequity as on promoting gender equality.

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The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects - objects that are also actors and images of life. The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature - Collodi's cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppet-like characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke's puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth's Mickey Sabbath - as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, "Puppet" evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.

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'A lovely kind of nostalgia, which colourises the black and white of yesteryear' - The Oldie Review'He writes about them all with wonderful precision and a powerful evocation' - Radio Times'Like my father before me, I believe that both the playing and watching of sport can teach us important lessons about ourselves by providing practical instruction in co-operation, tests of resolve and temper'For Michael Parkinson it was never really in doubt that he would spend his life in sport. His father, a fearsome fast bowler himself, indoctrinated young Michael from an early age into the Yorkshire cricket tradition and supporting Barnsley FC. All he ever wanted was to play cricket for Yorkshire and England.He rose through the ranks of Barnsley cricket along with his friends Dickie Bird and Geoffrey Boycott. But while they went on to find fame on the field, he spent the next few decades watching, writing and talking about sport. My Sporting Life is Sir Michael's love letter to sport, to the heroes and legends of his Yorkshire youth, to the characters of the international games he watched and wrote about, and to the very idea of sport itself. With warm humorous anecdotes about many icons of sport, from Shane Warne to George Best and Muhammad Ali to Fred Trueman, Sir Michael Parkinson reflects on his life writing about his one great passion.

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A fresh twist on 24 classic poems, these visual interpretations by comic artist Julian Peters will change the way you see the world.This stunning anthology of favorite poems visually interpreted by comic artist Julian Peters breathes new life into some of the greatest English-language poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.These are poems that can change the way we see the world, and encountering them in graphic form promises to change the way we read the poems. In an age of increasingly visual communication, this format helps unlock the world of poetry and literature for a new generation of reluctant readers and visual learners.Grouping unexpected pairings of poems around themes such as family, identity, creativity, time, mortality, and nature, Poems to See By will also help young readers see themselves differently. A valuable teaching aid appropriate for middle school, high school, and college use, the collection includes favorites from the Western canon already taught in countless English classes.Includes poems by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Christina Rossetti, William Wordsworth, William Ernest Henley, Robert Hayden, Edgar Allan Poe, W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Philip Johnson, W. B. Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Tess Gallagher, Ezra Pound, and Siegfried Sassoon.

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Life Lessons from Literature is a must for all bibliophiles, providing a concise and highly accessible bucket list of must-read books that teaches us so many fundamental truths and broadens our minds.‘I read a book one day and my whole life was changed’ ... So confesses the narrator of Orhan Pamuk’s novel The New Life. But what can we learn from reading books? Life Lessons from Literature poses this broad question by examining the works of some of the greatest writers in history.In it, we can draw wisdom from Charles Dickens’ views on poverty and wealth; seek comfort from ideas about love from Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. Yet books are about much more than just romance and money. Through careful examination of over one hundred classic works of world literature, life lessons are also drawn from themes such as conflict and oppression, identity and psychology, showing how literature enriches and informs our understanding of ourselves and the wider world around us.From Brazil to Japan, the Americas to Africa; from Victor Hugo to Mark Twain and Chinua Achebe to Haruki Murakami, you will find literature from around the world in this gem of a book, in which the plots may differ but the themes and the lessons they have to teach us are entirely universal.

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Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in CriticismA history of the chapter from its origins in antiquity to todayWhy do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple question, Nicholas Dames embarks on a literary journey spanning two millennia, revealing how an ancient editorial technique became a universally recognized component of narrative art and a means to register the sensation of time.Dames begins with the textual compilations of the Roman world, where chapters evolved as a tool to organize information. He goes on to discuss the earliest divisional systems of the Gospels and the segmentation of medieval romances, describing how the chapter took on new purpose when applied to narrative texts and how narrative segmentation gave rise to a host of aesthetic techniques. Dames shares engaging and in-depth readings of influential figures, from Sterne, Goethe, Tolstoy, and Dickens to George Eliot, Machado de Assis, B. S. Johnson, Agnès Varda, Uwe Johnson, Jennifer Egan, and László Krasznahorkai. He illuminates the sometimes tacit, sometimes dramatic ways in which the chapter became a kind of reckoning with time and a quiet but persistent feature of modernity.Ranging from ancient tablets and scrolls to contemporary fiction and film, The Chapter provides a compelling, elegantly written history of a familiar compositional mode that readers often take for granted and offers a new theory of how this versatile means of dividing narrative sculpts our experience of time.

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Bloom, el eminente y controvertido crítico que ha ido tramando, libro a libro, un complejo canon de la literatura occidental que atraviesa todas las épocas y, por supuesto, todos los géneros sin excepción, recala con este volumen en el que quizá sea su más preciada actividad: la lectura y crítica de poesía. Los más de cincuenta estudios sobre poetas y sus obras ?desde Shakespeare y Donne hasta Ashbery, Walcott o los desaparecidos Heaney y Strand, pasando, por supuesto, por las piezas magistrales que dedica a autores como Shelley, Byron o Dickinson? componen un generoso panorama de la historia de la poesía, en el que Bloom no evita ni la polémica, ni las habituales manías personales, así como tampoco limita sus lecturas a la lengua inglesa y fija su mirada en autores como Petrarca, Pushkin, Baudelaire, Octavio Paz o Pablo Neruda.Con una mirada rigurosa pero didáctica al mismo tiempo, con descubrimientos, tributos, y alguna que otra omisión reconocida, Harold Bloom ha escrito en Poem

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La hermana de nieve refleja el sentimiento de unas navidades bucólicas que todo lector reconoce en Canción de Navidad, de Charles Dickens.El libro que debes leer estas Navidades!Se acerca la Navidad. Christian cumple once años. Normalmente este es su día favorito de todo el año, sin duda el mejor. Los dulces navideños, el calor chispeante que desprende la chimenea y el esperado árbol de Navidad acompañan al pequeño en este día tan especial. Sin embargo, este año todo es distinto. Christian y su familia están de duelo por la falta de su hermana mayor. Parece que las navidades hayan sido canceladas este año.Un día el pequeño conoce a Hedwig y empieza a creer que quizás, después de todo, las navidades van a volver a ser como antes. Pero hay algo extraño en casa de su amiga Hedwig. Por qué ella siempre se muestra tan misteriosa? Quién es el hombre que los espía constantemente?Escrito por Maja Lunde e ilustrado por Lisa Aisato, ganadora de diversos

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“Offering a deeply necessary, clear-eyed look at who we are as flesh-and-bone bodies during the climate crisis, this is a book that searches and finds meaning in both the hard truths and the value of wonder.”—Ada LimónIn this luminous collection of essays, Ellen Wayland-Smith probes the raw edges of human existence, those periods of life in which our bodies remind us of our transience and the boundaries of the self dissolve.From the Old Testament to Maggie Nelson, these explorations are grounded in a rich network of associations. In an essay on the postpartum body, Wayland-Smith interweaves her experience as a mother with accounts of phantom limbs and Greek mythology to meditate on moments when pieces of our being exist outside our bodies. In order to comprehend diagnoses of depression and breast cancer, she delves into LA hippie culture’s love affair with crystals and Emily Dickinson

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A revealing, no-holds-barred portrait of the legendary Eileen Ford-the entrepreneur who transformed the business of modeling and helped invent the celebrity supermodel. Working with her husband, Jerry, Eileen Ford created the twentieth century's largest and most successful modeling agency, representing some of the fashion world's most famous names-Suzy Parker, Carmen Dell'Orefice, Lauren Hutton, Rene Russo, Christie Brinkley, Jerry Hall, Christy Turlington, and Naomi Campbell. Her relentless ambition turned the business of modeling into one of the most glamorous and desired professions, helping to convert her stable of beautiful faces into millionaire superstars. Model Woman chronicles the Ford Modeling Agency's meteoric rise to the top of the fashion and beauty business, and paints a vibrant portrait of the uncompromising woman at its helm in all her glittering, tyrannical brilliance. Outspoken and controversial, Ford was never afraid to offend in defense of her stringent standards. When she chose, she could deliver hauteur in the grand tradition of fashion's battle-axes, from Coco Chanel to Diana Vreeland-just ask John Casablancas or Janice Dickinson. But she was also a shrewd businesswoman with a keen eye for talent and a passion for serving her clients. Drawing on more than four years of intensive interviews with Ford and her intimates, associates, and rivals, as well as exclusive access to agency documents and memorabilia, Robert Lacey weaves an unforgettable tale of a determined entrepreneur and the empire she built-a story of beauty, ambition, business, and popular culture as powerful and complex as the woman at its center.

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Finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book AwardA sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family.In 2009, Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family. Her father’s father had taken his own life; so had her mother’s. Over the weeks and months that followed, grieving and in physical pain, Patterson kept returning to one question: Why? Why had her family lost so many men, so many fathers, and what lay beneath the silence that had taken hold?In three graceful movements, Patterson explores these questions. In the winter of her father’s death, she struggles to make sense of the loss—sifting through the few belongings he left behind, looking to signs and symbols for meaning. As the spring thaw comes, she and her mother depart Minnesota for her father’s burial in her parents’ hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas. A once-prosperous town of promise and of violence, against people and the land, Pittsburg is now literally undermined by abandoned claims and sinkholes. There, Patterson carefully gathers evidence and radically imagines the final days of the grandfathers—one a fiery pro-labor politician, the other a melancholy businessman—she never knew. And finally, she returns to her father: to the haunting subjects of goodbyes, of loss, and of how to break the cycle.A stunning elegy that vividly enacts Emily Dickinson’s dictum to “tell it slant,” Sinkhole richly layers personal, familial, political, and environmental histories to provide not answers but essential, heartbreaking truth.

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The fascinating, true, story of baseball’s amateur origins. “Explores the conditions and factors that begat the game in the 19th century and turned it into the national pastime....A delightful look at a young nation creating a pastime that was love from the first crack of the bat.”—Paul Dickson, The Wall Street JournalBaseball’s true founders don’t have plaques in Cooperstown. The founders were the hundreds of uncredited amateurs — ordinary people — who played without gloves, facemasks or performance incentives in the middle decades of the 19th century. Unlike today’s pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They worked, built businesses and fought against the South in the Civil War.But that’s not the way the story has been told. The wrongness of baseball history can be staggering. You may have heard that Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented baseball. Neither did. You may have been told that a club called the Knickerbockers played the first baseball game in 1846. They didn’t. You have read that baseball’s color line was uncrossed and unchallenged until Jackie Robinson in 1947. Nope. You have been told that the clean, corporate 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings were baseball’s first professional club. Not true. They weren’t the first professionals; they weren’t all that clean, either. You may have heard Cooperstown, Hoboken, or New York City called the birthplace of baseball, but not Brooklyn. Yet Brooklyn was the home of baseball’s first fans, the first ballpark, the first statistics—and modern pitching.Baseball was originally supposed to be played, not watched. This changed when crowds began to show up at games in Brooklyn in the late 1850s. We fans weren’t invited to the party; we crashed it. Professionalism wasn’t part of the plan either, but when an 1858 Brooklyn versus New York City series accidentally proved that people would pay to see a game, the writing was on the outfield wall.When the first professional league was formed in 1871, baseball was already a fully formed modern sport with championships, media coverage, and famous stars. Professional baseball invented an organization, but not the sport itself. Baseball’s amazing amateurs had already done that.Thomas W. Gilbert’s history is for baseball fans and anyone fascinating by history, American culture, and how great things began.

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Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments—the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action—undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. Reading works by Godwin, Austen, Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Dickens alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, Daniel Stout argues that the novel, a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualism’s ideological ascent, in fact registered the fragile fictionality of accountable individuals in a period defined by corporate actors and expansively entangled fields of action. Examining how liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity, Corporate Romanticism reconfigures our sense of the nineteenth century and its novels, arguing that we see in them not simply the apotheosis of laissez-fair individualism but the first chapter of a crucial and distinctly modern problem about how to fit the individualist and humanist terms of justice onto a world in which the most consequential agents are no longer persons.

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This is a "biography of the imagination, " an inner narrative of Sylvia Plath's life and work. Combining psychoanalytical, feminist, and intertextual methods, Steven Gould Axelrod traces what Roland Barthes has called "the body's journey through language." After an introductory look at the roles played by language and silence in Plath's verbal universe, Axelrod explores the ways in which the poet's father -- and father figures, including male literary precursors -- interfered with her imagination even as they helped shape it. He describes Plath's ambiguous relations with her mother and with the two literary forebears who took the mother's place -- Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson. And he examines Plath's doubling relationship to her husband, describing how she eventually transferred her doubling impulse to her texts. Axelrod concludes by suggesting a link between Plath's discontinuous narrative of the double and her personal fate. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words offers illuminating and often revolutionary readings of all of Plath's major texts, including such poems as "Daddy" and "Three Women, " her novel, The Bell Jar, and her letters and journals. At once sympathetic and incisive, it offers a compelling account of Plath's creative drive and personal history.

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Earthquakes have taught us much about our planet's hidden structure and the forces that have shaped it. This knowledge rests not only on the recordings of seismographs but also on the observations of eyewitnesses to destruction. During the nineteenth century, a scientific description of an earthquake was built of stories - stories from as many people in as many situations as possible. Sometimes their stories told of fear and devastation, sometimes of wonder and excitement. In The Earthquake Observers, Deborah R. Coen acquaints readers not only with the century's most eloquent seismic commentators, including Alexander von. Humboldt, Charles Darwitt, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Karl Kraus, Ernst Mach, John Muir, and William James, but also with countless other citizen-observers, many of whom were women. Coen explains how observing networks transformed an instant of panic and confusion into a field for scientific research, turning earthquakes into natural experiments at the nexus of the physical and human sciences. Seismology abandoned this project of citizen science with the introduction of the Richter Scale in the 1950s, only to revive it in the twenty-first century in the face of new hazards and uncertainties. The Earthquake Observers tells the history of this interrupted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk.

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THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLING MEMOIR OF SPY-WRITING LEGEND JOHN LE CARRÉ*NOW A MAJOR APPLE TV MOTION PICTURE*'As recognizable a writer as Dickens or Austen' Financial TimesFrom his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War to a career as a writer, John le Carré has lived a unique life.In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive - reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's interviewing a German terrorist in her desert prison or watching Alec Guinness preparing for his role as George Smiley, this book invites us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood.Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.'No other writer has charted - pitilessly for politicians but thrillingly for readers - the public and secret histories of his times' Guardian'When I was under house arrest I was helped by the books of John le Carré . . . These were the journeys that made me feel that I was not really cut off from the rest of humankind' Aung San Suu Kyi

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In the continental United States, rivers serve to connect state to state, interior with exterior, the past to the present, but they also divide places and peoples from one another. These connections and divisions have given rise to a diverse body of literature that explores American nature, ranging from travel accounts of seventeenth-century Puritan colonists to magazine articles by twenty-first-century enthusiasts of extreme sports. Using pivotal American writings to determine both what literature can tell us about rivers and, conversely, how rivers help us think about the nature of literature, The Meaning of Rivers introduces readers to the rich world of flowing water and some of the different ways in which American writers have used rivers to understand the world through which these waters flow. Embracing a hybrid, essayistic form--part literary theory, part cultural history, and part fieldwork--The Meaning of Rivers connects the humanities to other disciplines and scholarly work to the land. Whether developing a theory of palindromes or reading works of American literature as varied as Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and James Dickey's Deliverance, McMillin urges readers toward a transcendental retracing of their own interpretive encounters. The nature of texts and the nature of 'nature' require diverse and versatile interpretation; interpretation requires not only depth and concentration but also imaginative thinking, broad-mindedness, and engaged connection-making. By taking us upstream as well as down, McMillin draws attention to the potential of rivers for improving our sense of place and time.

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